Akshar Pathak, creator of Minimal Bollywood Posters shares his thoughts on his initiative, social media and how is the community helping him with new ideas.

I am a big fan of Bollywood movies and delightfully seen the best and the worst. In this madness, I have observed that a movie, however good or bad is always remembered for few moments. For example, the classic Sholay is still remembered for Gabbar, a thakur without hands or consider Yash Chopra’s Mohabbatein for the violin or the umbrella of Gangs Of Wasseypur.

The list can be endless but can we capture these moments to depict the entire movie in a single frame. Won’t be easy for most of us but it isn’t a big task for Minimal Bollywood Posters (MBP).

I came across MBP posters few months ago on my Facebook timeline and every comment on the post was either praising the creativity or was expressing surprise by the way the poster had depicted the movie. And soon the mad rush started of sharing posters that were supposed to be understood quietly with a big grin.

MBP was founded in the month of February, 2012 and is the brain child of a 22 year old creative producer, Akshar Pathak. The NIFT graduate living in the capital never created MBP with the intention of a business venture.

“Minimalism is an art in itself and when my expression of minimalism collected so many like-minded people who could appreciate the same as well as contribute their work, there was no looking back.”

For me Akshar has redefined the way we look at Bollywood posters since every poster brings a smile if you have seen the movie and if you haven’t then you start the search of finding out the meaning.

Akshar considers that most of the Bollywood posters are action packed with photo-manipulated images. He further explained to me that he removes all the unwanted things from the poster such as the heroine providing some mystique and sensuality along with the hero looking all tough and tries to provide a minimalistic twist to the posters.

“The procedure begins with stripping the object down to its bare essentials and then a handful of colors, shapes and positive/negative space conveys the basic idea around which the movie was originally made. All but the essential.”

Akshar has applied this minimalistic approach around a bunch of movies and some of the examples could be simple glass of orange juice and a carom board for Munnabhai MBBS. Or an old rustic telephone for Hera – Pheri.

Along with creating masterpieces, Akshar also made sure that he created awareness about MBP and Facebook was another simplistic choice. The Facebook page of MBP has now a fan following of more than 20,000 fans within just a few months. The posters have kept fans busy not only in watching them but also to involve in a dialogue. Every single content drives engagement that every brand manager would die for.

“I just try making things that people would laugh about and like to share / talk about with friends. That helps the name grow.”

Today the good work has spread like wildfire. The ideas that Akshar considers is mostly suggested by fans and not only that a lot of the posters that are shared on the page are contributed by creative fans.

“The page wouldn’t have been half as popular without all the submissions from other people. So I owe the popularity to them to an extent.”

Social media is all about community, if you have good content then definitely it would be appreciated and your own community becomes your brand ambassador. But how secure is MSB content, specially in this social media age when plagiarism has wider hands and legs.

Akshar who understands the gravity and has been a victim himself adds, “Yeah other people/pages/websites take my work all the time and publish it without due credit. I still don’t know how to solve this problem.”

Today for creative people social media has turned into a double-edged sword and one will have to use it quite efficiently. However this has not stopped Akshar to keep following his heart that is in MBP. This is what he had to say when I asked for any lessons learnt on social media.